Motivational Quotes

Music

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

- Armstrong, Louis

Best Quotes about Music

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

10.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

11.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Ruskin, John

12.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

13.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

14.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

15.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

16.

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

17.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

Britten, Benjamin

18.

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

19.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

20.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

21.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

22.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

23.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

24.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

25.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

26.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard

28.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

29.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

30.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

31.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

32.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

33.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

34.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

35.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

37.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Genet, Jean

38.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

39.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

41.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

42.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

43.

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!

William Shakespeare

44.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

46.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

47.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.